Been making a humble Thursday morning practice of popping in the coffee shop down the road before work.
Just to stand in line for a cortado and sit for a few minutes.
In between the standing and sitting, I always seem to find something to fill my cup.
This past Thursday there wasn’t much of a line, so I stepped to the front, ordered, and skooched to the left to wait.
The waiting area’s directly in front of where the barista prepares the orders.
I’m careful not to stare.
But I do try to catch a glimpse when they’re doing the pouring.
I find all artful pourers mesmerizing.
The person working Thursday is new-ish.
Been there maybe a couple months.
Didn’t know her name.
Just her smile.
She began with the requisite two shots of espresso.
Then moved to the milk.
I’m always curious to see if a barista trusts in gravity and surface tension to do their jobs … and fills the cup beyond its edge.
It’s always magic to me to bear witness to how the molecules grab on to one another, and keep each other from flowing away and spilling.
I find a hope in that.
Like nature’s just waiting for us to learn from its example.
I’ve noticed that some baristas favor the control of holding the cup in one hand to bring the spout closer … while others place the cup on the counter to keep a steady target.
The delicacy of the draw gets me every time.
The mere idea of painting with a brush that only ever gets so close to its canvas.
Seems prayerful to me.
Any distance between source and vessel requires a measure of faith.
I’ve learned that the precise amount required has little to do with how great or small the distance.
Hers was one fluid motion into the countered cup.
But then, she did this thing.
Post-pour, she reached for a spoon.
I watched as she used it to gently skooch some of the foam where she wanted it to go.
My immediate thought was that maybe things initially didn’t turn out the way she wanted.
As she skimmed the surface, she cupped her empty left hand parallel to her right … as if protecting a flickering match from the wind.
Her left hand had no practical purpose, other than maybe just to let the right know it was rooting for it.
By which I mean it may have had the most important job of all.
Satisfied, she put the spoon down and ushered my cup forward to let me know it was ready.
“I’ve never seen anyone do that … with the spoon,” I confessed.
“I do it all the time,” she said. “That’s my move.”
So, she had made no mistake.
She just wasn’t done moving mountains.
I asked her her name.
“Jaye,” she said.
“We’ll call it the ‘Jaye,’” I said.
“Aww, thank you,” she smiled, also a signature move.
It was only then that I looked down … to see that she had used the spoon to crack a tiny heart open.
By which I mean she used the spoon to crack my tiny heart open.
Whenever I am asked to meet with a new employee, I always start with the most important question.
I mean THE most important question.
I preface it by letting the person know that I’m about to ask them the most important question that they will be asked that day.
Possibly, the most important question they will be asked all week.
I let them know in advance that the question is cosmic in its scope.
Then I hit ’em with it.
“What is the greatest pizza of all time?”
I then take a minute to make sure they fully understand the question’s magnitude.
“In your expert opinion, across the hundreds of assemblages of crust, sauce and toppings you have experienced in the entirety of your illustrious, pizza-eating career … what is the GOAT?”
As they deliberate, I invite them to give thought to why.
What is it about it that makes it the greatest of all time?
The ingredients?
Where or how the ingredients are sourced? Is it the style? The type of crust? The manner in which it’s prepared? Is it the individuals who make it? The ambience in which they experience it? The location where it’s located? Is it the company they experience it with? Perhaps it’s the time in their life that they first encountered it?
Over the years, I’ve asked the question at least a hundred times.
Everyone answers differently, but they all have one thing in common.
The way their face lights up when they tell me.
You should see how such love lives on their faces.
__
So, I’m waiting out a Sunday late-morning flight delay at the Kansas City airport yesterday.
Young fella sitting next to me sees me holding a small print of a cat in a cowboy costume that some friends (who know me well) gave me that morning.
Asks me about it.
I tell him.
Then he asks me where I’m going.
I answer and, out of politeness, ask him the same.
He tells me he’s going to Paris for 82 days, to intern for a ‘church-planting’ organization … scattering seeds in France.
Couple minutes later, he’s asking me if I know Jesus, and whether I’ve accepted him as the only way to salvation.
In so many words.
I mean, soooo many words.
Meanwhile, the voice in my head starts audibly exhaling in discomfort, “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…” while rubbing the bridge of its metaphorical nose.
I’m just a guy admiring a print of a cat in a cowboy costume here.
Meanwhile my concerned neighbor is talking all about sin and eternity … with much conviction.
Which I respect both the act and substance of.
He’s going to make a great intern.
Says that our days are not guaranteed. Anything can happen.
“This might be the last flight we ever take,” he says, gesturing to the door to the jetway.
I don’t disagree.
He mentions that Jesus is coming back.
Soon.
I suppress the urge to mention that history is littered with a lot of humans who over-estimated their gifts for guesstimating that particular arrival time.
He starts peppering me with a bunch of questions.
And keeps pressing me for a verbal … like a flight attendant prompting an exit row passenger.
Meanwhile, all I can hear is Paul whispering in my ear “… with gentleness and respect.”
I genuinely don’t want to be disrespectful.
For all I know, God might be eavesdropping on his intern.
I also don’t want to get deep … meaning the granularity of it.
But I do want to get deep … meaning the heart of it.
And I know that if I choose the latter, he’s just going to want to further litigate the former.
But I couldn’t help myself.
So I answered him … by saying that I have a wise friend who knows more chapter and verse than I ever will.
And that the wisest thing I have ever heard him utter isn’t a Bible verse.
When someone asked him a question he didn’t have an answer for, my wise friend said that he wasn’t sure.
And added, “I’m OK with God knowing more than I do.”
Which pretty much sums up my faith right now.
It’s taken me a while to get to this cruising altitude.
I can’t tell you exactly how close I am to any destination.
There are lots of clouds when I look up.
I’m not even sure how accurate my heading is … as I tend to overestimate the scale of things.
I’m just trying to hold things steady enough to eventually give me a better vantage point.
Which is no small accomplishment, given my fear of heights and poor sense of direction.
But I do have some people in my life right now who are generous in sharing their coordinates with me. More experienced navigators who have logged a lot more miles, spent more time with the map, and seen a lot more of the world than I have. Best of all, they are generous in sharing the detours and emergency landings they’ve made … in hopes that I either avoid, or at the very least, take different ones.
God bless bound-for-Paris Josoo (“rhymes with ‘tofu’” as he introduced himself), but I don’t think I gave him the exit row answer he and his pilot were hoping for.
But his soon-to-be-summer employer should know that it wasn’t for a lack of intention on his part.
After a few minutes, I needed to detangle, so I got up to stand where the boarding lines were about to form.
I confess to you that I hoped that neither God nor United Airlines sat us next to each other on the plane.
But sitting and sifting here, though … I kinda’ regret praying for that.
Because I just thought of something I wished I would’ve asked Josoo.
I would have asked him to talk to me about love.
About love that rejoices in truth.
A love that always protects.
Always trusts.
A love that in spite of everything … still hopes and perseveres.
I’d ask him to talk to me about love so Great.
Love that never fails … even when all other prophecies cease, all tongues still, and all other knowledge passes away.
A love whose planes never run late.
___
By which I mean … I would have liked to ask him The Most Important Question.
At least the most important one anyone would ask him that day, if not over the next 82.
I would’ve asked him about the greatest pizza of all time.
I’d take a good minute to make sure he fully understood the question.
So I could learn what, in his expert, pizza-eating opinion makes it the greatest … out of all the hundreds of combinations that he’s experienced in his illustrious, pizza-eating career.
Just so I could see how love lives on his face, and feel how it lives in his heart.
Trust me … I would rejoice in learning of his personal relationship with pizza.
Which would expand my humble understanding of how crust, sauce and toppings can go together.
And all I know for certain is that he would answer the same question differently than anyone else I’ve ever asked.
And that, by the end, I would likely be hungry to experience pizza the way he experiences pizza.
And if the Spirit was really moving within me, I might even ask him his perspective when it comes to anchovies.
Not to convince him, mind you.
Just to see if we had any common ground there.
All of which to say … I’m no theologian.
I’m content knowing that if there is a God … she probably looks at me the same way I look at prints of cats in cowboy costumes.
But it’s hard for me to imagine that she cares all that much that I don’t like crust.
My wife Karry doesn’t mind.
I let her have mine.
Heck, maybe it makes God happier to see us sharing.
And I would never deign to speak for her, but I imagine that if God made us in her image, then she probably autonomically smiles when she sees how our faces light up when talking about the greatest pizza of all-time.
Heck, she’s probably just waiting for us to ask her The Important Question.
So she can reply, in so many words, “Have you ever tried it with the Jesus sauce?”
So that we can see how a love that hopes all things … lives on her face.
Ran into a friend at the coffee shop a couple weeks ago.
At the end of our brief chat, he invited me to a men’s Bible study he leads on Sunday mornings.
Said they’d be starting Second Timothy first of the month.
Even though it’s been awhile since I stepped foot in church, I said yes.
My friend is good light.
So, this morning I found myself gathered around a table with seven other guys.
My friend began by giving some context around Paul’s second letter to his friend Timothy.
Asked if we had any questions before diving us deeper.
I had one.
I asked if it was known whether Paul had any specific expectation, when writing to his friend, that Timothy might share the letter?
Or, did Paul intended his letter ‘only’ for Timothy?
My friend said he didn’t really know. Asked the rest of the group.
They weren’t sure, either.
Wow, I said out loud.
Suddenly found myself deeply moved.
By the humble act of a person who knew they didn’t have much time left, writing a letter of encouragement — from prison, no less — to someone he loved dearly.
No expectations of shares or likes.
Pretty remarkable when you think about it, I said aloud.
Which part, specifically? A voice at the table asked.
I mean … the fact of us reading a letter from almost two thousand years ago … written halfway across the world from the church basement where we were gathering … that was aimed at encouraging a single person.
Just, you know, the miracle of that.
Prompted the person to my right to mention that recently he helped get a car started over at the local college for a student who had broken down. Said that afterwards, she sent him just the most wonderful letter. How it moved him so much that he took a photo of the card to share it with some folks he knew.
He quoted a couple lines from it that were still on his heart, so that it could be on our hearts, too.
I told him that he made me grateful I asked the question … for the gift of him sharing the story of his letter.
Ten minutes into a Bible study about a book we hadn’t even cracked open yet … and already a sermon on the power of encouraging one another in trying times.
Anemochory.
That’s what nature calls it.
The dispersal of seeds by the wind.
“For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God.”
That’s what Paul calls it.
“We can’t change anything, but we can influence everything.”
That’s what the social scientist Robert Cialdini calls it.
Paul could not change the circumstances of his imprisonment. Of his impending death.
But he could send a letter encouraging his friend.
Regardless of our circumstances, we have agency over how we respond.
Of the energy we put into the world.
Paul’s letter to Timothy encourages us — to remember that encouragement is always an option.
Sitting around a table in a church basement grateful for asking questions, I am reminded that by encouraging one, others might be encouraged, too.
Letters for Maggie 